One of my sites moderators has just changed their e-mail address registered on the forums.

When they go onto their profile and click on the link to e-mail myself, it opens up a new message to the correct (new) e-mail address.

However, if they go to a posting that they've made and click on the E-mail button, it pops up new message with their old e-mail address. Tried a new test post (the first posting since changing my e-mail address) and when they click on the e-mail it comes up with a new message to the new e-mail address.

It appears that along with each posting is the e-mail address of that member and not the current one, but the one that they had registered at the time the posting was made.

Old messages have the email address of the poster at the time the message was created. The email addresses are encoded in the message file.

I'm guessing the original assumption was that users wouldn't be changing their emails all that often or people would be trying to email the poster from their newest messages. Unfortunately, this close to the holidays, I doubt I'll be working on a fix any time soon.

« Last Edit: Dec 21st, 2011 at 3:37pm by Dandello »

If you only have one solution to a problem you're not trying hard enough!

Old messages have the email address of the poster at the time the message was created. The email addresses are encoded in the message file.

Meanwhile, an admin can do a fix themselves as I've done before. If I remember correctly, I took the following steps:

1. Working with an updated backup of your messages folder, do a search in that folder for the email address that you want to change.

FileSearchEX is a superb file search utility that is free. It's surprisingly fast; much faster than simply using the Microsoft search command (download it from this page).

2. Using any number of free find and replace programs, enable the find and replace command to swap out the old email address with the new one.

3. Upload the changed and updated files onto your server, which should do it.

Important: As always, have backup copies of any files you change in the event there is a glitch, and the unchanged original files are needed.

Common sense should dictate that email addresses are changed from time to time, so people should simply work with recent posts and info to insure they're using the right email address for someone. Still, especially with what is supposed to be a permanent icon for an email address, a fix would be warranted.

On one of the websites my company operates, which contains user-generated content, some users have a tendency to change their email address every once in a while. For those users a simple permanent email address file is used as their email address. In other words, a refresh command with their current email address is enabled, and left intact is a short message that explains this in the event that such information is desired.

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Cool! I wish that we regular webmasters could do what you experts can so easily do.

If somebody could do with YaBB what was done with Facebook, i.e., make it user-friendly for the masses in terms of installation, than YaBB would be kicking it in a really big way.

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Considering the issues I had with trying to install SMF on my old host - installing YaBB was a walk in the park.

A walk in the park for you, sure. But you obviously know a great deal more about computer issues than most.

I consider myself to be adequate. On a scale of 1-10, of which you're a 10 from my perspective, I'd consider myself to maybe be a 7.

In any case, clean installations of YaBB for me were relatively easy.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when a chat forum's software is elevated to the point of operating like Facebook, i.e., no installation required, just use it, then every webmaster will want to use them versus just those who don't find the installation process daunting.

Maybe those of you in the known can gather your smarts to blow all other chat forums out of the water by developing a YaBB iCloud version so that people can simply fork off their own chat forums to fit their needs ... and in doing so all relevant chat forums can work together as part of a worldwide chat iCloud with YaBB having taken the lead.

Just thinking aloud here ...

« Last Edit: Dec 21st, 2011 at 7:37pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

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This forces the script to read the email address from the user file with the AIM and ICQ info instead of from the message file.

Note: This has been tested on 2.5AE only.

It would be great if anyone updating YaBB's code could make this the default setting. Hint, hint!

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Making the changes to the Display.pl file has caused some serious issues.

We have different people's e-mail addresses showing against posts. - ie, some are correct, but other users are then shown with another users e-mail address - very strange. - including those who have hidden their e-mail address.

...Making the changes to the Display.pl file has caused some serious issues....

Edited:

Edited to shorten the quotation.

First off, it seems that your Display.pl has gotten corrupted. If so, the easiest and fastest way to correct this is to use a recent backup to replace that file (doing daily backups is recommended).

Meanwhile (kind of the same thing) ... if in fact you think the changes you made in the Display.pl file have caused these problems, I'm guessing you should reverse those changes to revert back to YaBB's default settings for that file. Hopefully that will fix your latest issue.

Referring to your previous issue, as I mentioned before, members who have changed their email address one or more times will have different email addresses throughout the forum depending on the date of any given post.

If you give members the freedom to modify their own posts indefinitely, which is what we allow in our forum, they can update their own email address.

For instance, one of our members recently searched for an old email address of theirs that was showing up in search engines throughout our forum (36 instances), and they changed it to their current email address.

If a member has too many changes/instances to edit, you can do this for them with a find and replace command throughout your messages folder. Hopefully, developers of YaBB will make this an option in the Admin Center at some point.

« Last Edit: Apr 9th, 2012 at 5:01pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

For the instances where the wrong email address is showing - are there also issues with their profile or AIM or Facebook addresses?

The new version reads the email address from their profile, same as the default Display.pl does for AIM, Facebook, etc., so if it's bringing back wrong info, it may also be effecting other data being read from the vars file.

If you only have one solution to a problem you're not trying hard enough!

...The new version reads the email address from their profile, same as the default Display.pl does for AIM, Facebook, etc.,...

I didn't know this about the new version; sensibly smart way to do it.

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.